Forecasting US inflation by Bayesian model averaging

Recent empirical work has considered the prediction of inflation by combining the information in a large number of time series. One such method that has been found to give consistently good results consists of simple equal-weighted averaging of the forecasts from a large number of different models, each of which is a linear regression relating inflation to a single predictor and a lagged dependent variable. In this paper, I consider using Bayesian model averaging for pseudo out-of-sample prediction of US inflation, and find that it generally gives more accurate forecasts than simple equal-weighted averaging. This superior performance is consistent across subsamples and a number of inflation measures. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.